It all started with the wedding of Sita and Ram, says Diwakar Jha, Madhubani artist. For the wedding, Sita’s father Janak, the king of Mithila, had announced that all his subjects were to decorate their houses. “Like the way our governments make sudden announcements,” he adds.
Jha, 28, is managing his stall of Madhubani art at the Bidhannagar Mela at Central Park in Salt Lake. Around him are hundreds of scrolls, sorted according to size, in neat piles, from palm-sized to those that can cover a wall. The framed ones are hanging. A few bags with Madhubani print are also on display.
The figures of Sita and Ram, outlined simply and robustly and painted in the brightest colours, dominate the stall. Their intricacy lies in the fine linework that fills in the spaces. “That’s kachni (linework) as opposed to bharni (filling with colour),” explains Jha. A large piece with kachni work can take a long time.
Alongside the paintings of Hindu deities are scrolls with smaller, more abstract and exquisite figures, mostly done in black linework.
Jha is an electronics communication engineering graduate who got his degree from a private college in Madhya Pradesh. He has chosen Madhubani art as his profession, partly because of tradition and partly, of circumstances.
Every winter, from his village Jitwarpur in the Madhubani district in Bihar, Jha comes to Kolkata to attend the many fairs. Madhubani is part of the Mithila region.
As we speak, visitors drop into the stall and look at the scrolls. Very few buy anything.
“From December to March I will be here. The rest of the year I will be home making paintings. My whole family makes these paintings,“ says Jha. Assisting them are about 20 people from their village, which is now a “Madhubani destination”. It attracts many visitors, including students of design and fashion.
“I also work in the fields. We are a Brahmin family. We work as priests as well,” says Jha, a quiet, articulate man.
He is often accompanied by his father and brother, who are Madhubani artists, in Kolkata. They live in a rented room in north Kolkata, which they pay for the entire year.
“My grandfather told us not to give up on tradition. Besides, the company I had started working for after my degree had closed down,” says Jha.
Jha is an acclaimed painter himself, as are his father and mother and the other women in the family.
To understand Madhubani art now, Jha says, one has to understand its mythical past as well as its recent history.
King Janak’s proclamation led to the establishment of a vibrant, new household art in Mithila, says Jha. The walls were covered with bright, colourful motifs associated with marriage, symbolising fertility, prosperity and well-being. These wedding paintings were called “kohbar” and were done mostly by women.
“The motifs would be the sun, the moon, navagraha (the nine planets in the Hindu tradition), the divine couple Shiv and Parvati, a tortoise, because it carries the world on its back, is an avatar of Vishnu (Kurmavatar) and stands for stability, essential in a marriage, Lord Vishnu himself, and always, the bamboo plant, because it breeds so fast.” The Sanskrit word for bamboo is “vangsha”, which also means a generation or a family.
“This art was originally called bhittichitra,” Jha reminds.
So the wedding paintings continued from time immemorial till 1934, when Nepal and Bihar in India were devastated by an earthquake. Munger and Muzaffarpur towns were completely destroyed. Madhubani was very badly affected. This brought government officials into the interior villages for the first time, says Jha. They were stunned by the paintings they saw and began to encourage wider availability of Madhubani art, outside its natural precincts, says Jha.
By the 1970s, in an independent India that was rediscovering its arts and crafts, Madhubani art had transitioned beyond the walls on to paper.
Which led to several fundamental changes. “Traditionally kohbar paintings would not use black, a colour considered inauspicious. But Madhubani paintings now use the colour as border. The background is sometimes white now but previously a mixture of cowdung, neem leaves and multani mitti (a fine clay) were used on handmade paper to create the base.“
Vegetable or natural colours have been replaced by fabric paint to a great extent, though the paintings done with natural colours are far more soothing for the eye.
Jha proudly displays his own work, showing a finely detailed piece with linework, with a large owl in the foreground and several others within the frame. He calls it ‘The Parliament of Owls’.
“I read about it on the Internet. I found the collective noun interesting,” he says.
“But we have been trained in the scriptures. That helps us with our art,” says Jha. He recites the many names of Surya, Vishnu and Durga. Each name evokes a different image and that helps the artist to visualise the details.
“But ours is one school of Madhubani art: we call it the Mithila school. In our village the higher castes paint in this tradition. The other tradition is Godna Madhubani art,” he says, pointing at the linework paintings done in black with small, often tiny figures.
“These are done by the Dalit community,” says Jha.
If the Mithila tradition draws inspiration from Hindu myth and icons, Godna art does it from life around. “The lower caste women could not often afford jewellery. They got tattooed. Godna designs are often inspired by their tattoos,” says Jha.
They are more; they are also secular, and political.
“Please don’t think there’s any conflict between the two traditions,” Jha adds and brings out a large Godna scroll. It has a figure in the centre and several concentric circles around it, each filled with tiny figures. Every circle has a certain kind of figure.
“This is a representation of society. The figure in the centre is of King Salhesh, a key figure in Godna art,” says Jha. King Salhesh was a folk hero of the Dusadh caste in Nepal and India. The scroll depicts him ruling from the centre even as the subjects, birds, beasts and humans, surround him, co-existing, peacefully. Everyone is at the same level; if there is any hierarchy, it has been flattened by the scroll.
This form of monarchy looks better than many democracies now.